The upcoming Mists of Pandaria expansion doesn't have a release date yet, but that doesn't mean you can't start learning about all of the changes and additions now.

As you may be able to glean from the name, Mists of Pandaria brings pandas to the battle. Because why not? But there's more to Pandaria than just a desire to bring more cute creatures into the game. The whole continent is infused with a vaguely pan-Asian feel, from the visuals to the story. This also brings the Monk class to the party, which adds a lot of different martial arts styles to the combat mix. The level cap has been bumped up to 90, and there are several new factions for you to join.

Oh, and now they've added pet battles. The fights are turn based and resemble old-school Final Fantasy encounters. The pet battles are an attempt to keep more casual fans hooked.

Oh, and then there are the changes. Every class has been tweaked, some in small ways, others with significant changes. And the entire way you choose and raise Talents has been rebuilt from the ground up. From the previews it sounds like they're trying to make min-maxing less effective in an attempt to get people to make more individual characters. Too many players seemed to all be running the same version of each class, or class-race combo, and Blizzards wants their players to be a little less bound to a formula.

For higher level players, Blizzard has also added Challenge modes: dungeon raids with increased difficulty, with performances put on a leaderboard for all to see.

Blizzard isn't yet saying when Mists of Pandaria will be released, but all three previewers linked here feel the expansion is very far along, and seem to think a beta will start relatively soon, with a release coming this summer.

I'm well out of WoW and have been for some years, but it's still interesting to watch as it is such a giant of the MMO world, and now it's been running many years it's interesting to watch how they try to evolve it to keep it running.

Panda's have been knocking about since WC3, so I expected it at some point. I can envision 'fight clubs' starting up over the pets, and I think trying to make class builds more unique is a nice idea, although I honestly can't see how it will work.

I'm sure everyone will hate everything about it though and bitch continously all the way to the shop when they buy it.

I'll be there at release to check it out. It amazes me how much Blizzard changes the game. You cannot accuse them of playing it safe, at any rate. When it comes to mechanics, the current game bears little resemblance to the one originally released.

I think that's a part of why it's lasted so long though, it keeps refreshing itself. I always found it a good thing when I played, kept things interesting. Once you boil the mechanics down on any game and play them for so long it starts to get stale.

No fix to the terrible item inflation that's been plaguing the game since TBC is utter laziness. The numbers are going to get so fucking high. I came back to WoW last week after months of rift and I couldn't stand all the high numbers. To me it just looks..weird.

No fix to the terrible item inflation that's been plaguing the game since TBC is utter laziness. The numbers are going to get so fucking high. I came back to WoW last week after months of rift and I couldn't stand all the high numbers. To me it just looks..weird.

I find the fact you have an issue with it to be weird. Why does the magnitude of the numbers even matter to you?

That's actually a knife that goes both ways. The high numbers matter an awful lot to a lot of people, and that's why they decided not to do the "item squish". I don't understand why big numbers matter to a lot of people either.

The biggest news that wasn't in the news post is that the final boss of the expansion is going to be the current Warchief of the Horde, Garrosh. He goes over the line in the reflaring of the war between the Alliance and the Horde, and both factions decide to remove him. (Probably led by Thrall)

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The Looking For Raid tool brought me back to the game. I can experience content and get tier pieces in a casual manner without having to join a raid guild, or go through the amazing amount of time and frustration it used to take to form a PUG raid. Cross-realm raiding/dungeon running is also a big plus, though they need to work on expanding that.

Hopefully they don't do something terribly stupid like they did with Cataclysm when they decided, "It's time to get hardcore again, let's crank up the difficulty!" I don't play WoW for the challenge, broskis.

No fix to the terrible item inflation that's been plaguing the game since TBC is utter laziness. The numbers are going to get so fucking high. I came back to WoW last week after months of rift and I couldn't stand all the high numbers. To me it just looks..weird.

Raid tool, really now. I have not played since TBC, that could be interesting..

Yep, right now it only works for the newest raid, but it's supposed to be expanded over time. You queue up just like the dungeon tool, and it eventually puts you in a group. The LFR raids are the lowest tier of a raid, it still has all the content and items, but the tier pieces are a different color, and the boss mechanics are more forgiving. The equipment is all the same but with slightly worse stats than normal raiding, and even worse when compared to Heroic. You can run LFR, Normal and Heroic in one week, independently.

Making a "Challenge Mode" is brilliant and it's going to be the next thing that all AAA MMOs copy. There are casual players who want to be able to get the slow-but-steady progress that comes from beating heroic dungeons and then there are hardcore players who want extremely difficult dungeons that aren't "easy"

The truth is that hardcore players are actually playing a very different game than the casuals. A casual player in a pick-up group may have a couple friends with them, but they also have a couple of PUGs that may or may not be idiots. The hardcore players usually have their whole team filled with competent players from their guild who understand how to min/max their characters, have all the UI mods that help them know all the bosses special attacks so that they can move, jump, interrupt a spell, stack behind the tank, etc. (and the instructions flash on screen too). Casual gamers don't have that, and they don't do things always immediately take their new gear to get it gem-slotted, enchanted, and reforged in order to increase their dps. They also don't necessarily know the absolute best dps skill rotation, talent spec, or how to queue up their attacks so that there is no dead time between spells.

All of these things add up so that a hardcore player will often literally be outputting 50-100% more damage than a casual player. This means that fights last 50-75% as long as they normally do and healers don't have to heal as much because the tanks are better and the fights are shorter. . . so to challenge the hardcore players you have to make content that feels almost impossible to the casual players.

By creating a challenge mode, they can give hardcore players the challenge and the notoriety they desire without gating casuals. They'll be able to go after awesome gear and find success as the heroic mode will be tuned to be a challenge for casuals and the challenge mode will be tuned as a challenge for hardcore.

This is very smart design and it shows a higher level of understanding their audience than we've seen from Blizzard in a while. They tend to think of the hardcore audience they interact with most as their core audience when casuals are by far more numerous.

I don't really see the problem with big numbers. That's kind of been the core of dungeon crawling RPGs since... forever.

It becomes a problem in coding as the macros that handle calculations for smaller numbers are able to cut corners that save processing cycles. Basically, bigger numbers when you consider that there are thousands of calculations being passed between the server and client every second start to become a problem.

Personally, I think the exponential growth isn't really necessary. If people want to skip Hellfire Ramparts (who doesn't really? I get so tired of that fucking level and I've still not seen all of Area 51 and that other high level Outlands map. . . though honestly, I just can't stand Outlands anymore. I have all these level 58-62 alts that I've just not touched) to get to the 3rd "continent" then they should be allowed to do so.